


Vice

by Necronon



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Extended Universe - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Hannibal (TV) Fusion, DogsDogs, Hannibal Extended Universe, M/M, Manipulative Hannibal Lecter, Nigel is Hannibal's twin, Pining, Poor Life Choices, Possessive Behavior, Sexual Content, Sexual Roleplay, Vignettes, also actual dogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-01 11:44:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14519808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Necronon/pseuds/Necronon
Summary: Will does his best to forget the Chesapeake Ripper, but it's slow going. Slower when Hannibal's twin answers Will's ad on Craigslist.





	Vice

**Author's Note:**

> Found this in my folders. My [tumblr](https://thenecronon.tumblr.com/).

She looked at him and saw liability. Unnecessary risk for a dangerous brand of whimsy. If there was any art in it, it was not the practical wherewithal she wielded. Not a coup designed to kill, but mangle; not flesh, but composure. The agent of chaos, ever affronted by equilibrium, marching his pawns over the edge. Blood granted no more immunity than loyalty, it seemed. They were all stamped with dual dates of expiration—the natural one received upon birth, and Hannibal’s. Will Graham’s was particularly generous.

She had Will Graham to blame for her detour to Bucharest.

Chiyoh watched her contact watch her, his gaze lingering on the ratty suitcase she toted in one hand. It was well traveled, unremarkable except for its contents: an M40A6 of which she was uncharacteristically sentimental for its custom stock and quick assembly. He parsed the mundane accouterments and her wool pea-coat, unseasonably heavy, with a thorough once-over that could be mistaken as salacious. He was doubtlessly accounting for the smaller S&W and possible blades concealed on her person. Her posture, which was disciplined, was likely dismissed. His own, in addition to his injuries, had assured her that he was not a significant close-quarters threat.

Nigel Ibanescu was a loose cannon with a sloppy dossier. Poor rapport notwithstanding, he had one redeeming characteristic: he shared a face with Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. She’d been dubious when Hannibal had announced he had a twin; but now, in person, there could be no mistake. She was looking at Hannibal with a pin-up girl and black eye, skin a hair darker, and hair a shade lighter, with a voice slightly roughed by decades of smoking and substance abuse.

She saw why Hannibal hadn’t mentioned the man before necessary. She’d have to strive to school her amusement when she next saw him. A disgruntled Hannibal didn’t bode well for anyone.

“Fucking Americans,” Nigel said, holding out his new passport and inspecting it with a squint. He still refused the reading glasses Chiyoh had supplied him.

Along with increasing farsightedness, one of the Romanian’s ears was bound in white gauze, an eye swollen and shadowed by a big plum-colored ring. His hand tremored as he shoved a cigarette between his lips and struggled to light it. He’d recently endured a rapid detox under Chiyoh’s strict supervision.

When Hannibal had asked her to babysit, she hadn’t realized how petulant her charge was actually going to be. Innate behavior. She couldn't blame old money—Nigel had been separated from the Lecter fortune at birth.

“You have three days,” she warned. She was patient, acutely aware that her calm irked him, as did her obvious advantage.

And that she’d come at his brother’s behest.

She wondered what it must be like to fear obfuscation. She, someone whose anonymity was both an asset and ideal, considered Hannibal’s fear of being forgotten. Of becoming insignificant. He’d already vanished from the front page, rarely more than a footnote on a student’s thesis, or tabloid gossip. Even Will Graham had moved on, or so Hannibal feared.

His letters went unanswered, visitor’s list pristine besides inquiring minds and grad students looking to get an edge. An old toy left under the bed, like Hannibal had done with so many before him. She’d reconciled herself with her fate. She almost pitied him. Maybe some part of her, the same sliver that comprised her loyalty, did pity him still. A hungry, wild animal, finally confined to his cage. There was a dull feeling in her chest when she thought about it—something like disappointment. She felt the same when she looked at Nigel, but her pledge to Hannibal stayed her hand. She anticipated the day Hannibal no longer had need of him.

No need of her, and, eventually, no want of Will Graham. Three lives whose deaths would be anything but natural.

 

* * *

 

Will flipped open his phone and checked his voicemail while he waited. He was a little surprised he had a buyer at all, let alone within the first hour of posting. The old Volvo ran fine, but it was nothing to look at, and he was expecting a no-show when a frowsy taxi cab turned off the road and trundled down his gravel (now loamy) drive.

It stopped and idled. A man exited the backseat, pulling a suitcase and duffle bag after him. Will shielded his eyes against the failing light to see as the man bent to pay the fare. The cab driver shook his hand enthusiastically—he must have tipped—and backed out, leaving the stranger with his belongings in the middle of nowhere, on Will’s property.

_Bastard didn’t even want the cab to wait..._

Will felt uneasy. He didn’t move and let the man approach, eyes scanning up and down his person for a concealed weapon or any sign of hostility.

“Must have a lot of faith in my character to—what the fuck—” Will jerked back his outstretched hand and his body as he got his first good look at the man.

Dark, discerning eyes under sleepy lids. Prominent brow and cheekbones casting gaunt shadows. hair, too pale, fanned across his forehead. Skin, tan. Neck, tattooed. Shirt, dachshunds?

Will was staring right at a caricature of Hannibal Lecter, like maybe his cannibal shrink had spent the last year in Cuba, vacationing instead of in prison, and had a midlife crisis or two along the way. Except the bruises, the limp. The fact that the man’s suitcase was, upon closer inspection, an attache.

The not-Hannibal held his hands up in surrender. “Not gonna bite.”

The accent was not unlike Hannibal’s, but not the same either. Will stood, shell-shocked with bewilderment, as the imposter fished out a pack of Lucky Strikes and hurriedly lit up. He inhaled, let his head fall back, and sighed out a jaunty plume of smoke.

“Fucking finally. Cabby gave me the stink eye about ‘em.”

“Who...” His mouth was dry. He swallowed and tried again. “Who are you?”

“Nigel. Will, right?”

“Last name... Lecter?”

Nigel laughed. “Thank fucking not.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, clearly not sorry and in fact growing very angry, “can you elaborate?”

“What’s that, darling?”

“You’re not here to buy my car.”

“I am, actually. But I’m also here because you’re Will Graham. And I owe a favor to You Can Guess, who’s apparently concerned about your convalescence or some shit. What did he say?” Nigel scratched at his chin. “ ’I’m concerned about Will’s investiture in unsustainable pursuits.’ ”

Will groaned. Sounded like Hannibal, all right. “You’re...his brother.”

“Right.”

“Twin brother.”

“Right. Can we take this inside?”

“Christ. I don’t think so.”

Nigel shrugged his shoulders and combed his hair back with scuffed fingers. “Can we skip the fucking posturing? Don’t exactly have a choice, and if you don’t play nice, neither of us are going to like it. This ain’t some fucking house call, darling. And word has it, you got rooms to spare.”

 

* * *

 

Nigel moved into one of the spare bedrooms upstairs, away from Will’s canine crew who were all inexorably excited to have a guest. Will suspected they all assumed he was their beloved sausage-clad cannibal, claims that dogs could distinguish between identical twins notwithstanding.

Nigel’s personal effects were economical, the man himself often absent for days. Apparently, he trusted Will not to turn him over as certainly as he trusted Will to snoop through his belongings, if the lack of his attache and other identifying information were any indication. There was a picture of an attractive young woman with dyed hair in the night stand, something written in a language he couldn’t read on the back. Everything else was impersonal.

After almost a week went by, during which Will saw neither hide nor hair of him, Will thought the man was gone for good. Until Will came home to find him smoking on his porch, foot kicked up onto the splintered balustrade like he owned the place.

“Shouldn’t you try to be a little more discrete?” Will asked, stopping on the first stair.

“Mmm.” Nigel ashed his cigarette and flashed him a disgustingly charming smile. “How was work?”

Will scoffed and went inside, letting the door rattle shut behind him.

  


* * *

  


It came to a head when, one moderately inebriated evening, Nigel walked into the living room wearing an umber three-piece with a shock of savage red and white paisley for a tie, snapping Will out of his devout quietude.

Will’s tumbler slipped out of his lax grip and exploded against the floor, shards of glass singing across the pocked wood. The finer pieces disappeared into the gaps between the slats, along with two fingers of Jameson; they were going to be a bitch to fish out. He really needed to sand and refinish the floors.

Nigel pushed the last cuff link into place and genuflected, carefully gathering the larger pieces of glass by Will’s feet. Will watched the back of his head with open shock.

They both knew whose it was—why Will had a three grand suit tailored to Nigel’s dimensions. Why Will’s fingers had curled into tight fists as his face drained of color.

“You went through my fucking things,” Will snapped.

Nigel stood, cradling the glass in his hands. “So did you.”

“That’s not... Why—” Will threw an arm out at him. He was like his father in that he spoke with his hands when he drank. And when he was pissed.

“Needed some duds for some pending business. Thought you wouldn’t mind.” Nigel paused for emphasis. “Unusual souvenir,” he hedged, and Will thought of spleens, kidneys, lungs. He thought of his navel, his head, of hands and fever.

Nigel left to deposit the glass into the trash, returning with a dust bin and broom. Once the mess was clean—Will had used the interlude to fix another whiskey—Nigel joined him in the kitchen.

Nigel lengthened his posture, drew up straight, and pushed fringe from his dark eyes. He took a measured step forward and buttoned the front of his worsted jacket—buttoned into the suit, into character. Will matched each of Nigel's steps forward with one back until the counter stonewalled his retreat. Nigel didn’t speak. The wrong word, the wrong intonation, and the illusion would shatter—but it didn’t.

 _What are you doing_ , he meant to ask. But he was too captivated to speak. His chest was tight, mouth dry.

Nigel was gone, replaced by a haunt from Will’s past. His present, if he were honest with himself. There was only Hannibal, silhouetted by the living room door. Drawing nearer, each step ratcheting up Will’s panic. A feline traipse that masked strength and intention. The phantom presence that had haunted the corridors of Will's mind, made flesh. Elevated above man, above all of Will’s reticence and shame.

When Hannibal pressed into the bend of his neck and drank a deep, deep draft of his scent, the only thing Will felt was unfettered exhilaration. A buzzing in his bones that felt like being alive.

Will angled his head and let him take his fill.

  


* * *

  


“This one?” Nigel asked, cigarette bobbing between his lips. He held the tie up for inspection, looking past it for confirmation from Will who stood in the doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“Yes.”

It was a slate tie with a silver paisley print, like so many carp fingerlings swimming in a silk prison. Will’s breath hitched as Nigel pulled the long tongue of fabric between long fingers, steely over tanned and calloused knuckles.

“Expensive?”

“Yes,” Will affirmed. _Very._

Nigel placed the tie over his knee and plucked the cigarette from his mouth, eyes narrowing. “You wanna do it?”

“No. Just... get dressed in the bathroom. Or I can leave. I don’t want to see you.”

“Ah.” Nigel flicked some ash into his empty beer bottle on the night stand. “Don’t wanna see the transformation, huh? Nah, you just want to undress me after.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You don’t have to.”

Will swallowed the lump in his throat and fixed his gaze on the cherry at the end of Nigel’s cigarette. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Nigel hummed, a resonate _mmmm_ as if tasting his answer. Then: “One vice for another, darling.”

“And don’t call me that. Once you’re... dressed.”

“Ye of little faith.” Nigel took one last drag and surrendered the cigarette to the bottle. It sizzled out in the tepid beer at the bottom. “I know what you’re about—what you need.” A slow, sharp smile. “Might just have a little fun while I’m at it, too. Get out so I can get dressed.”

Will stared a moment longer. Then he left, closing the bedroom door softly behind.

 

* * *

 

Will wondered about a version of events in which Jack had cared a little more. Alana, a little less. A version that didn’t involve an assured recommendation, an introduction disguised as a briefing, a rubber stamp, and ten cooling rounds in the body of Garret Jacob Hobbs. A version of events in which, when Jack Crawford had asked for more than he was ready to give, Will had told him _no_. A version in which Hannibal didn’t have a twin brother sequestered away in Romania. A world in which Will had been allowed to _forget_ him. One in which he married Molly—an alternate reality in which he hadn’t found a man named Nigel Ibanescu on his property, shaggy-haired and sporting a tasteless tattoo on the side of his neck of a bikini-clad woman in repose. Five minutes, and maybe they would have passed each other like ships in the night, and Will wouldn’t be waking up with a hangover and a smarting back from mean fingers. 

Cotton-mouthed and breath sour, one of Hannibal’s paisley ties lying by a torn condom wrapper.

It nauseated Will to see the evidence of the night previous now that he was arguably sober and the sun was up. The morning glared, unwelcome, through the lopsided slats of his blinds, casting bright bars of light over the detritus that marked Will’s most recent moment of weakness: the product of too many fingers of whiskey and a curt phone call. The soft snoring from the man behind him made his stomach lurch. Everything was there to remind him that nothing had changed. Hannibal Lecter was still in the bowels of the BSHCI, and the man that slept beside him was only a pale imitation—an ill-conceived coping mechanism, but one that didn’t mind the liberal use of Hannibal’s name while they were between the sheets.

At least not yet.

Will’s sad excuse for a bed reeked of menthol and sex. He didn’t smoke, but people were starting to ask. He should probably keep a pack on him for verisimilitude. Smoking was a more palatable indiscretion than gratuitous sex with the twin brother of his cannibal ex-psychiatrist.

Will pushed himself up with no small amount of effort and threw his legs over the side of the bed. He stood, pulled on a clean pair of boxers, and hobbled out of the bedroom to start coffee. He stared at the loose coffee that freckled the counter around the base of the machine and considered his involuntary house guest. His inability to share mornings (and about everything else) with anyone had been a factor in his lack of relationships. It always seemed like a good idea, until it wasn’t. Until someone sidled up against him and he pulled away and they took it wrong. Tired old phrases: _I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not you. I’m just tired._

When what he really wanted to say was _leave me the hell alone._

If nothing else, Nigel understood that. Nigel, who looked and, when he was obliging, and oh how obliging he was when he wanted some, sounded a lot like Hannibal fucking Lecter. All hushed words and hot lips and sharp teeth. They were both animals, but it was the particular animal Nigel was in a special position to replicate that interested Will. Fuck him for that, too. Hell, he wouldn’t be surprised if it was all Hannibal’s doing. Some more of that _think of me_ bullshit, because the worst thing that could ever happen to Hannibal was to be forgotten, to become insignificant somehow. But that couldn’t be it—no way was Hannibal okay with Will fucking his brother. Alana, Margot. What might of been Molly. None of them were okay.

Will set his cup down so he’d stop squeezing it and jerked the carafe loose with more force than necessary. Buster fidgeted as he filled his mug. Winston, ever intuitive, tried to nose curiously between his legs, but Will shoved at his head and scratched him absently behind the ear.

“Breakfast, I remember.” _No_ _people_ _sausage, though._

Will dumped homemade kibble into several aluminum bowls, signaled breakfast, and listened to enthusiastic crunching as he rocked in a chair on the porch and sipped his coffee. A gnat plunged into his cup. Will dispassionately swabbed it out and flicked it into the void. He wasn’t going to toss his coffee now—he’d already added a shot, and that was alcohol abuse.

He stared out over his property, the scrub glittering with hoarfrost, and thought, _Oh, Christ. I_ _fucked Hannibal’s brother._

  


* * *

  


They had a routine. Will would drink, knock twice on Nigel's door, and ask if he wanted dinner downstairs—then, after a _pro forma_ meal, if he wanted to suit up and fool around. At first it was just to eat, just to watch; then it was just to kiss, just to fuck. In the morning they never discussed it. Never brought it up. They had an understanding, a tacit and mutually beneficial zero-sum game.

Hannibal could never find out. When Will retrieved his mail that morning and opened an envelope from the BSHCI and saw the hand-written letter inside—Hannibal’s uncharacteristic brevity was foremost unsettling—he knew that he had.

Will pinched the ivory card stock between his fingers, dimpling the smooth parchment and disfiguring the beautiful copperplate “W” that began his name. He drew in a sharp breath, held it, and read.

 

> _Dear Will,_

> _A certain predilection towards vice should be expected of a man that lies with dogs. Tell me—when you close your eyes, does that sharp mind of yours hasten to remedy the disparity? Do your fingers find my likeness in the dark?_

> _H. L._

Will startled when a heavy hand fell onto the bare skin of his neck, just where it transitioned into shoulder, his own so tight on his mug that it was a miracle the handle remained attached.

“What are you doing?” Will not-so-surreptitiously folded the letter away as Nigel fondled his neck and the space behind his ear, tugging some of his curls straight. Will’s scalp tingled. He closed his eyes and collected himself. Then stood, brushing the other man off, and made to go inside.

Nigel raised a brow, looking after him. Up and down him to be correct. “Had a change of heart?”

“I've got to get dressed.” _I can’t do this._

Nigel caught his arm and held fast. When Will turned, Nigel reached for his face, telegraphing his intentions with a slow approach. Like Hannibal, until... Will hissed as the hand bypassed his cheek and twisted cruelly in his hair, jerking his head back.

“Don’t be like that, darling. We had a good time last night. Let’s go another round before you leave.”

Will splayed a hand hand over Nigel’s smug expression and pushed. “Get out of my face. Get out of my—”

Nigel licked his hand. Will tore away from him, repulsed. “Seriously?”

“What’s that?” Nigel wetted and pursed his lips. “Whiskey already?” A hoarse laugh. “And I thought I was bad. Not sleeping, whiskey for breakfast—fuckin’ mess.”

Nigel was close now, looming. No, this wasn’t Hannibal. There was no control, no greater purpose, in his fiery eyes. Nigel was clutching for balance just like Will. Object permanence issues. People permanence issues.

No microexpressions, just a curled lip and tapered teeth. Will braced when Nigel lurched forward and crowded him against the wood siding on his porch. He hit the wall with a grunt, paint chips flaking off and falling by his feet. Nigel was fully healed now, and strong as a brick shit house. Will fucking loved it, but he wasn’t going to tell him that.

“What is it, huh?” Nigel said beneath his chin, kissing and mouthing at his neck. “ _I want you, I need you, we’ll run away together._ ” Nigel affected a tone too like Hannibal’s for Will’s comfort. He was good at it now, antagonizing him. “That what you want? You want me to get gussied up in three-grand three-pieces and talk pretty? Or dirty. _Clever boy_ _, my Adonis._ Greek bullshit this, Dante that. Or...” Nigel grinned against him. Will could feel the sharp points of his cuspids. Hannibal’s feral mouth. “Maybe you’re done talking. Maybe you just want your face pushed into the fucking mattress, ass up. Which one is it, darling? Don’t be shy. How long have you wanted to fuck or get fucked by my brother?”

Will snarled. “Go to hell.”

“Not sure I haven’t.”

“On the table. During dinner.”

Nigel froze. His dark eyes thinned. He held Will, presumably digesting the admission, but didn’t loosen his grip. Then the hand in Will’s hair tightened. The length of his body rolled, a small victory that bolstered Will’s confidence. Will hissed; his back ached where it was crushed against the counter.

“The pinstripes or—”

“The apron. Slacks and shirt.”

“Mmm, been saving that one.”

“You’ll give me anything I ask for,” Will said, a vicious smile spreading his lips wide as he released his death grip on Nigel’s arm. He pushed his hands into the man’s hair, brushing it back into an inexpert replica of Hannibal’s neat coif. “All I have to say is _please._ Isn’t that right—” A shuddering breath. “—Hannibal?”

Nigel’s quiet a moment. Will feels him teeter between fury and arousal before his resolve reasserts itself. Almost—his hips rock once. He breathes deep, scenting him, eyes fluttering closed for a vulnerable moment. Intentional or not, so apropos of Hannibal that Will purses and wets his lips. The transition is seamless.

“Then let me hear you say it. Use your words. Ask for what you want. What you need. Ask for me, Will.”

 _God_ , it sounded just like him. Nigel must have known his estranged brother better than he’d initially let on, because if it weren’t for the tan, the tattoo, the stink of tobacco, and the fact that the real Hannibal was still in his little glass box, Will might believe the man before him was the very same.

It was just a little thing, a little indulgence of the imagination, and Will deserved at least that much after all the shit he’d gone through. He could say all those things he couldn’t before—fire live rounds because he was aiming into the void.

A smile from Nigel, but not Nigel’s crooked, mocking flash of teeth. No, it was Hannibal’s reserved delight, the most minute change in expression that spoke volumes. God, he was really going to play along, and he was right on the mark. Nigel looked like a Hannibal that had never been betrayed, a Hannibal that had taken Will cross country like they’d discussed. Not on the lam, but eloping. Nigel—Hannibal—craned his neck and closed his mouth over Will’s. Will threaded his arms around Nigel’s back and kissed him hard, kissed until it hurt. Until Nigel thickened against his thigh and nipped at his jaw and ear, slipping a wet tongue behind the shell of his ear.

“Let me have you,” Nigel said into his ear like a secret. “Consume you in this one way that we can survive.”

  


* * *

  


That morning, Jack called him to his office. Once the door was shut and Will was seated, Jack crossed his arms, set his elbows on the edge of his desk, and said, “He’s asking for you.”

“Can you be a little more specific?” Will feigned ignorance, but Jack’s expression suggested he was doing a piss poor job of it.

“You know who.”

Will sighed. “You’re just giving him what he wants.”

“May be. But he claims to have critical details about a case we’re working on. Very suddenly.”

“He could just be bluffing.”

“Do you think he’s bluffing?” Jack asked.

Will snorted.

“So you’ll do it.”

“Do I have a choice?”

Jack’s expression didn’t change.

  


* * *

  


The screen door cracked against the frame as Nigel pushed through. Will grimaced as he strolled up to him and bent at the waist, familiar lips quirked into an unfamiliar smile.

“Don’t look so sour, darling. You’ll feel better soon.”

“How I feel,” Will said, lip curling, “isn’t the issue.”

Nigel frowned. “I’ve been nothing but hospitable to you. You should try showing a little gratitude.”

“It’s my house. And you’re my guest.” Will grit his teeth. Godammit, he just wanted to be left alone. “How much is he paying you? Or is it what he’s promising not take from you?”

“You really think I’m only here to keep tabs?”

“No.” Will looked him in the eye, jaw set. “I think Hannibal Lecter is planning his _coup de grace_ and hasn’t told you shit. I think you’re here, and pissed about it, waiting like the rest of us. I think you can’t stand Hannibal, and can’t do a thing about it. So...” Will smiled. “Here you are. Here I am. Leaves in a very, very capricious wind.”

Nigel straightened, plucked the cigarette from his mouth, and exhaled from his nose, surveying Will through a thick plume of smoke. He flicked the butt, letting the ashes pepper the floor by his feet. “What’s he to you?”

Will opened his mouth and hesitated. Nigel looked tired, too wrung out to spar with him, even verbally, and his voice had gone soft again. “A bad habit,” Will decided.

“Hmm. I’ve seen that look before.” Will waited for the bullshit—the butchered quote or short-sighted observation, something concisely un-Hannibal—when Nigel added, “Like you’ve been put together just long enough to know when you’re not anymore.”

“I’m doing just fine.” If his voice hadn’t trembled, he might have sounded scathing.

“Fine’s not enough. Not anymore.”

Will observed the mundane vista of his living room. The paintings and books that he’d adopted from the previous owners. A place estranged to him. Not home. Not anymore, and maybe it never was.

No, it wasn’t enough.

 

* * *

 

“God, you do look like him...”

Assuming, Nigel reached for his collar and loosed the knot on Hannibal’s tie, then...

“Leave it.”

Nigel’s brow quirked, but he obliged, hands falling back to his sides.

Will pushed out of his chair and stood before him. His next breath was audible in the small space they shared. He should feel pleased that Nigel flinched and bristled as he reached for him, but he didn’t. Will set his hands on his chest. Then, with only the slightest tremor, loosened the tie and pulled it from Nigel’s neck.

“I think,” he started, and almost didn't finish. “You... were right.”

“About?”

“It’s difficult to reconcile.”

“The way I look with who I am? Or who I’m not.”

“I was going to say with what you know, and what I didn’t.” Will breathed. “I’m not usually sentimental.”

“Just a casual collector of dogs and convicts’ formal wear.”

“Will you touch me?’

Nigel hesitated. “Do you want me to—”

“Like this,” Will whispered, guiding Nigel’s hands to his face. Will closed his eyes, face hot, but he was well past toeing the line. It took the last of his strength to peer back up at Nigel and say, almost inaudibly, “Please.”

Fingers carded into his hair, massaging along his scalp. A thumb found the harsh line of his jaw, suddenly intimate. Will shuddered and sucked his bottom lip into his mouth, biting back an unexpected sob. He was too full, too drunk, and spilling. In front of fucking Nigel, he was... oh God.

Will’s shoulders sagged and his head fell. It bumped Nigel’s chest. The tie, Hannibal’s tie, had finally lost its scent. There was only a trace of cologne beneath menthol.

“Will.”

Will gasped. “We—”

“ _Shh,_ let me look at you.”

Nigel was a voyeur too, and Will was too damn tired to _contest it_. Add to his exhaustion a thread of tension and truth that effectually subverted Will’s stubborn protest. Everything was kinetic with untapped subtext, every touch a foray into uncharted territory.

The charade was slipping.

Will couldn’t even hate him for it, in the same way he couldn’t hate Hannibal for his brand of cruelty, because for all the ugly, there was a severe honestly, a raw, open simplicity that Will understood with an alarming intimacy. Nigel was not a good man. But he wasn’t the Machiavellian spider spinning intrigue in the shadows either. He had no secrets, at least not of character, not ones self-imposed. It was with bitter revelation that Will realized Nigel’s only obfuscation was Hannibal’s handiwork. Hannibal, still plying his pawns from his glass prison, hiding behind the ill-fitting suit of his feigned insanity.

Out of everything, it was because Nigel was a man. Out of all the brutality and blood, it was the face of his father twisted with repulsion, one in a gathering crowd, that made him jerk away. The weight of shame and conditioned disgust. The terror of doing something so irrevocably damning that he’d be shoved right over the edge of the small, flat world of his childhood. Right into hell.

He wanted to laugh. Would have, were he not folding into himself and tucking his head against Nigel’s scrutiny. His dim offense that made Will want to shake him and scream because Nigel would never understand him, never know him.

Will didn’t know when it happened, when Nigel started wanting more, but Will wasn’t sure he could give it.

  


* * *

 

  


Nigel kissed him into the bed and covered him with his weight. Pressed the shape of him into the shabby duvet with deep, languorous rolls of his hips. Sucked soft sounds from him until it was too warm, too good, and Will’s mouth was too open to smother, muffled groans escaping around a plunging tongue as Nigel escalated the issue.

And it was an issue. At least, it would be tomorrow morning, sober and all out in the light.

Nigel pulled back to admire the evidence of Will’s reciprocation, erection caught in the paltry bit of modesty that was a threadbare pair of boxer shorts. It lay thick and jerking against his hip, waistband bulging where the damp tip was caught beneath.

Will indulged the voyeurism and let his knees fall open and to the side. He saw more than heard Nigel’s sigh, felt massive hands combing his ample thighs appreciatively.

“Oh, darling...”

Will licked his lips, head falling back against the pillow. He looked down his nose, body, between his legs at Nigel and said, “Just for while, I want to feel good. Make me feel good.”

“No dress up?”

“No. It’s fine like this. Tonight.”

Nigel nodded and lowered himself between Will’s legs, kissing lazily at his slack mouth.

 

* * *

 

He didn’t hide the dark bruises on his neck and collar. He stood casually on the opposite side of the barrier and waited.

Hannibal’s nostrils flared. It was fleeting, but Will recognized the split second Hannibal’s comportment slipped, like the horizon juddering above hot asphalt. A twitching lip rising above a cuspid, dark eyes at once brilliant and bottomless, bright in the shadowy cell. All hot amber and monstrous. Some volatile concoction of outrage and hunger that hit Will with all the finesse and force of a sledgehammer—the unexpected guilt, like ballast in his groin and stomach, pulling him down into Hannibal’s deep sea.

Will’s breath faltered. He was stricken by the animal fear of suffocation—of water in the lung.

Hannibal’s jaw unlocked and, as Will remembered to breathe, he gently smiled.

Will’s blade just missed the mark, skirting the gut. Superficial, but Hannibal wore his indignation like a nick over his heart, and it was enough.

“It’s good to see you,” Hannibal said.

“Oh?” Will smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m seeing a lot of you these days.”

“They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Will stepped up to the divide between them and placed a hand on the glass. “And are you? Flattered.”

Hannibal glanced askance, chest expanding beneath the cheap cotton of his uniform. Looked back to Will. “I’m eager to restore authenticity where I had previously presumed no place for it.”

The flowery syntax disguised nothing. Will bit down on his lip to keep from doing more, saying something egregious. “And you think you’ll get that chance?”

No hesitation this time. “Dear Will, I’m certain of it. Now, more than ever.”

 

 

  



End file.
